Yep. Pretty much.

Some things.

I don't think people bringing up That One Time happens on a constant basis in his interactions. It only became relevant when he was raised to a position of prominence within the furry community by being the new head coder on the (next great) revamp of the biggest art site in the community. Then, one person remembered That One Time and objected, and people remembered and then a lot of important discussion was lost in the drain of what happened That One Time and if there's any/sufficient proof to condemn or exonerate.

Secondly, his abrasiveness doesn't help. People who were working on the (apparently unofficial and unsanctioned) original revamp were going to integrate into the new team, only to brush up against his personality and come away with a negative experience. I don't think That One Time came up in those interactions, so it's entirely possible he may have been an asshole preemptively, if that is indeed why he's an asshole now. If that's the case, then he's a jerk for taking out frustrations on parties who (so far as I know) were not bringing up past alleged transgressions. Also, his programming skills have come up because he's been seen as inquiring if others were knowledgeable in the language he'd apparently chosen to write the newest Revamp in, which may poke some holes in his own knowledge level.

Thirdly, there's the matter of That One Time. Rape as a crime is apparently really hard to prosecute, since so few people actually get jail time for it. Compound that with the fact that, more likely than not, victims know the offenders, this is really hard. Plus, when you get into the criminal justice system, you will need to repeat and ostensibly relive your story again and again and again and again for the slim possibility that justice is served. Also (and I do not remember where I got this, but I know I've seen it) a vanishingly small percentage of rape reports are false accusations. Somewhere around 3%. Now, couple all that together, and this suddenly Very Prominent Person who's been accused of heinous, yet hard to prosecute crimes is given reins to head up the biggest site in the community. This makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable.

Granted, there's been noises by Dragoneer that he won't have access to private notes and so on and so forth, but that still makes people uncomfortable. Which brings me to my fourth point: FA's handling of the situation. The first response FA's admins took to the objection about the new coder is to hide/delete and effectively censor the comments of objectors, up to and including 24 hour bans. This, wrongly or rightly, looks like FA has something to hide, regardless of FA's policy against 'drama' or whatever. This only increased the uproar, and further and faster references to That One Time. Then, FA took five whole days to even begin to address the legitimate concern over the new coder. Instead of possibly taking control of the situation, stuff got out of hand QUICKLY and rendered FA's response, whatever it was, rather weak without it being read.

FA's administration does not have the best reputation, and so far as I know it's been pretty well earned. While you can apply to be an admin and undoubtedly there's a vetting process, you can't lose your position no matter what you do if you are Dragoneer's friend. And Dragoneer's friends seem to get into administration/prominent positions regardless of skill or experience. Now, if FA were an otherwise well-run site, this would be much less of a problem. However, this is obviously not the first time that FA has promised a revamp, with previous projects falling well short of actual implementation, and generally resulting in patches applied to code that I'm given to understand is terribly broken as-is. Couple that with the recent week long downtime that apparently happened when Dragoneer tried to hope a problem wouldn't come up, but it did... and yeah.

All or some of this have pretty much made some people decide that FA is no longer for them, and take their bags and go elsewhere. So far, though, Weasyl has shown itself to be responsive and nimble to complaints, generally resulting in a better experience for users. Now, it is entirely possible that Weasyl is going to have their own issues or uncovered skeletons, which might lead to an objection and an uproar. Nobody quite knows how that staff is going to handle that yet. But it does seem that Weasyl has plenty to learn from FA's mishaps.

I'm gonna reply to this.

As for your first thing, I give you that. It's not likely *everyone* has been bringing up That One Thing to him everytime they meet him. But it *is* likely they're doing it enough to affect his interaction with other people.

The second thing has it's merits too. I also think if he was brought in to do a job, and not only didn't work well with the team, but showed a lack of skill, then he should have been promptly shown the door. That's the professional way to handle things on both sides of the interaction. He should have held back on irritating his co-workers, THEY should have communicated their problems to Dragoneer, and HE should have either stopped the behavior or replaced the person causing the problem. Instead, the one person drove all the others off (showing he didn't really care about the project as much as himself), the other people all left almost right away (showing THEY didn't care about the project) and Dragoneer refused to change a damn thing (showing HE didn't really care about the project). Furries.

My problem with what you say comes in on the next statement. What rape? Did it happen? Proof? Anything? Here's why I have a bit of a problem with that whole scenario. A friend of mine has a long term, very stable relationship going on. At one point a girl he had been close to called him, told him she was pregnant by him, and that she was refusing to have an abortion. This threw his entire life into disarray. He finally managed to get the girl to go to a doctor with him to see what was what... and it turned out she was lying. She hadn't been pregnant, and only wanted to try to force him out of his current relationship in order to make him be with her. She was perfectly willing to ruin his entire current life for her own purposes.

I myself had a certain female get angry at me some time ago. She took it apon herself after getting mad at me and deciding she didn't like me anymore to smash the rear window on my car at the time (a $120 replacement), and take the leather jacket I had left inside (a $400 coat). She then threw it out someplace and reported to other people in the house (she, I, and some others were sharing it at the time) that she "noticed it was missing; someone needs to tell that dumbass". Over time after that, she accused me of more and more ridiculous bullshit, even resorting to a journal here on FA trying to smear me with her fans, until I was forced to move out of the house. This was all done because of something I said to her about a situation I felt was wrong. I had *done* NOTHING to earn the level of hostility I got back.

If Zaush was involved in a relationship with this person (and the rumors I've heard say he both was and was not) and they had sex that was later regretted (again, the rumors say she both willingly had sex then was upset she had, or that she was outright raped) there is SO little to support the idea it even WAS rape for people to go the "rapists usually get away with it" concept at all. Did he actually rape anyone? No one knows, but they DAMNED sure are quick to say so! And some people don't care, and some people say she's the one trying (successfully, if that's the case) to smear his name because she got upset with him.

People will do amazing things to get even with someone else. If he raped her, it could have been a case of "use and discard"; he got what he wanted, and kicked her to the curb after. If she got mad at him, it could all be a smear campaign, one that's been working as much because he's well known and attracted the attention of everyone instantly as anything else.

As for the stuff about FA, I honestly don't understand it. Zaush isn't really an admin to my understanding, just a coder. This means he has access to the site's functions, but is not "in charge" of anything. His only job is to complete the project he's working on, then (hopefully) get the hell out of Dodge and go back to drawing art. People being upset that he's "in charge" seem to think he's going to start banning people and such (or something), and that *shouldn't* be true at all.

Did they fuck up by banning people and deleting journals? Hell yeah they did. I'm not really sure what was going through Dragoneer's mind when that started (or whoever's mind) but it was disturbingly similar to what goes through your ass when you're taking a shit. I also agree that the administration here has been lackluster at best, and downright Clown College at it's worst, but I have no way of saying anything about that; personally I put it down once again to Furry Internet Mentality, which is basically "Anything I do is right; other people don't know shit about shit; if I fuck up, I *obviously* MEANT to, geeze."

Finally, there's this you said: "So far, though, Weasyl has shown itself to be responsive and nimble to complaints." Complaints? Already? xD If people who only just moved to the site are already laying in with the complaints, see my comment above about F.I.M. "Hi, I just got here and thee's a few things you guys need to change to suit me better. WTF have you been doing here, anyway? Don't you know how to code?" No one... NO ONE... should be complaining already about Weasyl after just going there.

This, though, was not the point I was making. I wasn't trying to say Weasyl is going to start turning up problems. I was saying The people who are currently GOING to Weasyl are going to bring their problems with them, and then kick up a fuss" It's not a "maybe" sort of thing, or a "it might happen". It's GOING to happen; this is how the fandom works.

If he's leery of communicating with random people due to random people bringing up a nonzero amount of references to That One Time, I can understand why he'd be a bit gunshy about doing so. However, he seems to have gotten over it enough to make jokes about it, which seems to me the very opposite of things.

I agree that if the accusations of those who worked on the previous (again, apparently unsanctioned) team were justified, then somebody should have looked into the why of it, and probably taken him off the job. Howev's, cronyism seems to be the name of the game, and though these personality conflicts were made public, nothing was done with them except for FA to distance themselves from this former team and throw their support behind their guy.

And as you have a problem with my statement, I have an issue with your reply. You seem to be conflating your and your friend's experience with FA's New Coder. While it is indeed unfortunate that your friend had a false pregnancy allegation throw his life into disarray, and you had your jacket stolen and your back window smashed by somebody who was unreasonably offended over a very small remark, that does not invalidate the accuser's claim against the New Coder. All parties seem to agree that they had sex: her, the New Coder, and Dragoneer when the allegations were made to him about what she should do about it. Now of those, only one person believes that the actions were completely consensual, with the other two casting doubt upon this.

As to your contention that this might be an intentional smear campaign: it wasn't. The original kerfluffle happened when FA got hacked, and the notes were released in one huge batch. Sifting through these notes found the accuser's to Dragoneer, saying (if I recall correctly) that she was coerced into sex, and that she believes that it had happened to a few others, and that there are some concerns she had about it and what she should do. Dragoneer said that she should keep everything quiet in the name of Not Spreading Drama, and that is what she did. The ONLY reason this became public was because of the note hack. If it didn't, then we wouldn't know about it.

Now with this information, people started accusing the New Coder of rape. Rape is a serious allegation and I will concede that it was perhaps made in haste. However, it doesn't mean that no crime occurred. We've heard the two sides, and more likely than not the truth is somewhere in the middle, which going by the allegations some amount of sexual assault happened. And as I said before, false accusations are rare.

While FA's New Coder is not an official admin, he was given the keys to develop the new website, built from the ground up. While concerns about this are perhaps made wildly, I don't think that they're without foundation. Somebody in that position could, if they wanted to, code themselves a backdoor that only they know about it, and use it to harass people if they so desired. I don't think banning or anything is an issue, unless you count having Dragoneer's ear, in which case the point is somewhat moot.

I do not know if this FIM is as widespread as you seem to think it is. Not saying it isn't, I don't know that it is. Regarding Weasyl... I don't think 'complaints' was the right word. Weasyl has been actively soliciting and implementing suggestions based on user experiences. I also don't know if suggestions have been pitched from a FIM view, but I would hope that such suggestions are weighed on their merits.

Having said that, it's without a doubt that people going to a new website are going to bring themselves with them. I don't think that's a furry thing so much as a people thing, or at least "people on the Internet" thing. However, how these websites deal with such people is up to them.

I only have one comment here, and it's about the experiences I related. I was more pointing out that there is always another side to things, and that sometimes people will say things that are not true in an effort to make someone else look bad.

For example. Why did she come to FA and talk to Dragoneer, who could do nothing about it? Even if things came to light during the hack, what makes her accusations real or not? I'm very leery of taking people at their word; more so as I deal with more people, rather than less, and so I feel that more than typed words are needed here in order to accept it offhand. I'd like to know what reference the concept of false accusations being rare comes from; is it that these accusations were researched to that conclusion? That seems in contradiction to the idea that most rape cases never even get reported.

As for the FIM thing? That's more of a feeling I get when associating with people in the internet in general, specifically in places where text takes the place of face to face interactions. Most people, after making a point, will at least peacefully argue a point they've made, and at worst will refuse to even think on anything other than their stance being the correct one. I call it a furry thing mainly because furries seem to enjoy the drama more than "regular" people (which I mostly think furries are; just a type that thrives on drama).

Oh absolutely there's always another side to things, though very often the three sides are (in this case) his, hers, and the truth. You, however, seem to be much more suspicious of her claims based, at least in part, on your experience with people, particularly girls, leveling false claims upon you and your friend. Now, had you clicked on the previous links (which they were), you'd see my support to those claims. I'll repost them here: 3 out of 100 rapists serve jail time, offenders are very often known to their victims, and in at least one study, false reports of rape happened 5.9% of the time.

Why did she decide to go to Dragoneer first? On its face, that seems like a curious decision. If she was indeed assaulted as she so claims, why not go directly to the police, right after it happened? Police report or it didn't happen! ...only things are a lot harder than that. Again, I refer you to the statistic that just 4 of 10 rapes are reported (link). Rape and sexual assault are traumatic experiences. Sometimes it can take years for people to be able to be comfortable about even discussing that this happened to them (see: accusations of pedophile priests), much less reporting it to the police, which requires them to relieve the event, then have to defend it against people who will invalidate it because "Oh she's just crazy and changed her mind on me!"

Going through this the whole way, just to see that in most cases the accused will simply walk free? That's hard. That is extremely hard. And often, the more prominent the person, the more believable they'll be regardless of the truth. So, it could be said that she went to Dragoneer for a first step. After all, FA's New Coder is a prominent person within the furry community by virtue of his skill in artwork, which also means that he has legions of fans, a non-trivial percentage of which would be inclined to defend him against all accusations and slander any accusers.

See my reply to mtext below.

There's also the small matter of the several other female artists who came forward after the whole thing originally broke, to say that he had tried the exact same things on them as well, which was in fact the context of her initial note to Dragoneer--that a popular artist was known to her and her friends to behave this way and did he think she should warn people openly. Even Sciggles was apparently instantly able to identify him personally when Dragoneer described the situation to her with all names left out. At what point do you decide that a vast dramatic smear-conspiracy is the less likely scenario? All of this stuff is a matter of record and it's not too hard to find compilations of the evidence if you really want to see it.

Don't misunderstand, either of you. I'm not saying it's impossible that she is telling the truth, only going on feelings and personal experiences. I've heard of the many other females who reported that they had had similar experiences with this guy, and I understand a lot of people can't deal with going back through the entire thing again. But I can't help but wonder how, if this was and is such a common thing that a group of women all had the same experience... I dunno. It seems even harder still to know someone did something like this to you, then *let them go about their business, doing it to others* instead of saying anything. Or to not band together and take it to a court outside of the fandom, thus avoiding the negative press and such that they claim they don't want AND stopping what has to be a sexual predator if the accusations are all true.

Why let him keep going on and on, doing it to more and more people, instead of stopping him?

As for the records and such? I actually *don't* want to go into it to that depth. This journal was originally created simply to voice my opinion, however misguided that might be. I admit freely I could and possibly am wrong. I don't know what happened to these people other than what they've said, which I've not had said directly to me. I wasn't there in any of those situations, and I've never met the guy in person (except once, very briefly; I considered commissioning him but he was full already).

The thing that is bothering me the most is the involvement so many people feel they have the right to take when dealing with this. Everyone can and will have an opinion as to what's going on what should be done and why or why not they feel things should or shouldn't be the way they are. But when it comes down to a concept such as rape, and apparently SERIAL rape, or at the very least serial sexual harrassment, I don't feel like, just because I'm a part of the fandom, I have some right to judge someone based on someone else's word. And in this case the fact that all of these females have claimed the same thing, something so personal and horrible, and yet not said anything, not (as far as I know) even spoken to each other to confirm how things happened and then taken action to remove this threat from the world... I don't understand it.

It's like a bunch of people in a neighborhood knowing someone is killing people and dragging their bodies into his house... and not a single person speaking up to the police or other authorities. And then it only being brought to light when the killer runs for mayor or something for someone from another area entirely to go to that street, see everyone watching this killer go about his business and saying nothing, then raising an alarm for it to become an issue.

I want to say this again: this is all my opinion, my feelings (call it a gut feeling), and something based on previous happenings in my own life. I do not claim all these girls are lying. I do not claim Zaush is innocent. I also don't claim the girls are telling the truth, or that he's guilty. I'm merely voicing my opinion based on some of the things I've heard over and over, and looking at the situation from an outside perspective. I'm not trying to "unearth the truth". i'm not a detective, and I'm just not nosy enough to go digging in other people's extremely personal business if they themselves don't want people to know or do said digging. They said they don't want to press the issue because they don't want the negative attention, right?

I suppose I just want them to break out of the statistical boundaries if these accusations are true and there are THAT MANY OF THEM, and just go report the guy. It might be hard, and embarrassing, but it'll stop another report of him doing the same damn thing again to someone else from surfacing some weeks/months/years from now.

...and now having done the thing I said I didn't want to I have gained more info on the subject.

Apparently Zaush and Dragoneer both admitted to Zaush basically blackmailing or coercing people into having sex with him based on his popularity within the fandom or some other info or concept. Not cool. WAY more than not cool.

I still don't know the entire thing. I haven't seen where either of them said these things. But if true, I can only restate what I said before. People need to get off their asses, band together, and report this person to the authorities. Nothing stops someone from accessing a website like prison. If he's been tricking or forcing people into sex, they need to get his ass locked up.

As for my stance on FA...? It's still basically the same. Yes if this is true the admins here are all goofballs, and need to seriously consider what they're trying to do here. What point is there in revamping the website if everyone leaves it? ...But I'm going to stay, and see what happens. At least until something OTHER than everyone bailing happens...

If you are inclined to go digging further, I could point you to a direction or two where more information could be found.

As for your assertion that this should have been directed to the authorities, I don't dispute that. That's the logical thing to do.

Sexual assault is not logical, nor is its aftermath.

I'm still here, but some of the artists I watched aren't, hence the weasyl account.

As far as I'm concerned it's up to the authorities to decide what happened and sort it out, and I don't mean the website's management.